Is CRM essential for small businesses?

Every small business also wants to understand their customers, build stronger relationships with them, and provide better customer support.

Also, for a small business, retaining the leads is more important than just acquiring them. The more clients they can bring to trust them, the stronger their market position becomes.

A CRM can do all this and a lot more for small businesses.

Is CRM essential for small businesses?

Customer relationships and internal process efficiency are two CRM benefits’ categories to achieve large-scale transformation for small businesses.

But, for a small business with limited resources and a limited appetite for risk, it’s difficult to trust a new software that has the potential to disrupt their business processes from the ground up.

This section helps small businesses trust CRM and decide positively in favor of technology.

1. Leave manual tasks to the software

A small business CRM consolidates data from all business sources, including any other current CRM systems you may be using.

So, sales agents won’t get lost in the sea of spreadsheets and documents.

A centralized data resource helps create automated workflows for everyday tasks for a sales agent such as:

• Following up with a new lead – A smart small business CRM can automatically schedule a reminder by tracking your conversations with the lead
• Send welcome emails to a brand new customer for onboarding – With the CRM, you need to create a workflow that sends onboarding email sequence – only once!

Every time a lead converts into a customer, it automatically triggers the welcome email sequence without any manual intervention.

• Nurture the lead if they take the “buying signal” action – With a deadly combination of a CRM and the right marketing automation system, responses to emails can be programmed in a workflow to trigger new email sequences.

These new email sequences can be based on whether if the lead’s response to a particular email is positive or negative.

These automated sequences are sent without any manual intervention.

2. Actively capture more leads and make more money

Without pop-up forms on your website, all your content marketing efforts would go waste. Visitors would come on your website to read some content and visit a few pages.

But then they would just up and leave – even if they like your content and products/services you offer. That’s because nobody asked them to share their email.

Having a pop-up makes sure you get more leads into your CRM that you can later nurture into customers with automated email sequences.

More leads give more customers that pay you more money.

Ultimately, having a CRM is pretty much a guarantee of increased sales if you have an effective marketing and sales process in place.

3. Qualify more leads with high-efficiency marketing

A single screen to collect data from multiple incoming sources (including email activity tracking, communication over email, call notes, meeting notes, etc.) makes a small business CRM very powerful.

You can analyze this data and understand your customer better. The longer your sales cycle, the more data you have for analysis. As a result, you extract more accurate insights.

You can use these sales insights as feedback for your marketing team. They can use this information to create a more targeted and personalized marketing communication strategy.

4. Earn even more money by finding the most profitable leads

Without a small business CRM system, all your leads are equal. There is very little visibility into the potential value of each deal. This might make it hard to find the most profit.

Lead scoring is another important feature of CRM that can help you make more money.

Modern CRM take into account the need to buy immediately (or as early as possible) as a critical factor while computing the lead’s internal score.

The higher the lead score, the better are the chances of your sales agents converting that lead and making a higher amount of money than without a CRM.

5. Retain more customers with faster and more efficient data access

No customer likes repeating their complaint over and over again to every new phone agent. Without a CRM system for your small business, your customer data stays fragmented; your phone agents are not at fault here.

CRM brings together all the customer case data on a single screen so your agents can quickly resolve cases and delight their customers.

The more customers you delight, the more customers you retain.

CRM is a must for a small business

CRM has direct or indirect advantages for all stages of the customer journey. The CRM industry has players suitable for small businesses and startups with all sorts of budgets.

Despite all this, if you still refuse to use a CRM, you leave a huge chunk of small business revenue on the table.